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Borderlands Theory – Hyperion is a cover

I have already shared my Borderlands theory about Handsome Jack being still alive at the end of Borderlands 2. That is obviously feeding into what I’m going to cover in this theory, but the events of The Pre-Sequel also left me feeling curious about Hyperion and all of the loaders and bots in Borderlands 2. I remember feeling like loaders were always a little flimsy and non-threatening, at least not until the later playthroughs. It wasn’t until I played The Pre-Sequel that it all made sense, these are not robots built for combat.

Construction Workers

If there is one thing The Pre-Sequel makes clear about Hyperion is that it’s not a military organization. The only piece of the company that is military in design is the stolen military AI that gets installed into the constructor bot. Outside of the AI in the constructor, everything else is utilitarian and built for grunt work like mining and construction. In fact, they don’t even have the software for combat until Jack has you upload it into them very late in The Pre-Sequel. He even says he wants to “test out” the software by uploading it into some loaders. I thought this was a creative way to give some background to why the towering villain and his army felt somewhat clumsy and cheap in Borderlands 2. The city of Opportunity and Hyperion weapons communicate a facade, something that wants to be pristine and valuable even though it really isn’t. The guns have to shoot for a while before getting accurate, the city is under guard, and Moxxi manages to help you flood Jack’s construction site.

A fun theory to consider if Jack is still alive, what if Hyperion was just a cover and a front to test out what a robot army might look like? He has the military AI and and the constructor technology to build an army, he’s just lacking robots that are built and engineered for combat. In other words, the loaders aren’t built for combat, so maybe he was just testing out the software on disposable bots that could be constructed over and over as a way to prepare for what he really wants: total domination.

War is coming

The end of The Pre-Sequel is cryptic and strange, but it makes one thing clear: war is coming. This is stated by the strange eridium alien and it is basically the last thing we see within the Borderlands narrative before the Telltale games pick up the ball. So after the conclusion of fighting Jack, winning, and then tracking down anyone that was left in his employ, this alien says that, “war is coming”. To me this means that what happened in Borderlands 2 wasn’t a war, but just the prologue. If I’m right about Jack still being alive then he may be one of the leading causes of the coming war. The Hyperion robots just aren’t formidable enough to bring a “war” theme to the game, so Jack would need something bigger, something grander. A more refined militaristic robot army that learned from all the mistakes what happened with Hyperion tech would make for a pretty daunting foe. What do you think?